In the Orbit of Mars
by Julia456
Summary: Season 4. When Scott disappears, Jean and Rogue have to work together to save him. Um... this could be bad.
1. Red and White

Note: This is set in Season 4, after "Uprising" and before "Cajun Spice". I actually started writing it back then, but shelved it until just recently. So it's been five, six years in the making. Yeah. Well. Better late than never, right? :)

_---_

_"Being red, she loves him best; and being white,  
Her best is better'd with a more delight."_

_Venus and Adonis_

_---_

"Scott's missing."

The words, blurted out over the phone line without so much as a "hello" or "Merry Christmas" preceding them, made absolutely no sense to Jean. She stood with the phone poised at her ear, in the middle of her family's kitchen, with her mother and sister talking and laughing loudly over the music of a holiday CD in the living room. An entire long second passed. "I'm sorry?"

"_Scott_ is _missing_," Rogue said again, louder, as though Jean was hard of hearing. "He's not at the Institute-"

Relief hit her with an almost physical blow; it was all a misunderstanding. Scott wasn't missing. Her Christmas vacation could go on just as pleasantly and smoothly as it had been before. "No, no," Jean said, correcting the other girl not unkindly, "he was going to come straight here after he got back from Hawaii."

"I _know_." Rogue's accent was thickening by the moment, a sure sign of her distress, and even as Jean tried to refute the possibility of Scott's disappearance, she knew that Rogue almost never got upset without due reason. "But he's not here at the airport-"

"You're at the airport?" Jean asked in surprise. Then she realized that the background noise on the line - halfway buried under the background noise from her family's celebrations - wasn't static, but the sounds of a crowded airport terminal.

"Yeah. My Christmas present to him - someone to pick him up." The tone was laced with accusatory venom. Jean had not been there to pick Scott up, and Jean was his girlfriend. The fact that Jean's plans had been in place for months, long before Alex's last-minute offer, evidently made no difference.

Jean said nothing, and after a moment Rogue exclaimed, impatient, "I've been here for two hours, his plane just landed, and Jean he is not on it!"

The older girl was still trying not to panic. In fact, she was trying to calmly reason things out the way Scott would have; her first inclination was blind terror. She clamped down on the fear and forced herself to _think_. "Well, have you called Alex? I mean, did Scott even leave on time?"

"I'm not-" Rogue bit off whatever she was going to say and restarted with, "Yes I called Alex. Alex said Scott made his flight."

"Couldn't he be stuck, in - in a layover?"

"Honolulu to New York non-stop. Jean, you've gotta come down here."

Jean glanced over her shoulder at her mother and sister, at the red-and-green, gold-tinsel splendor of the house. She hadn't spent any time with her family for months, not since the dual pressures of college and mutant crusading had cut back her vacation chances severely. "What about Storm or the professor? Aren't they-"

"The professor went off somewhere, and Storm went to visit her sister," Rogue said. Now she sounded more upset than angry or bitter, and her accent had taken over completely. "There wasn't nothing gonna happen except Scott comin' home."

Jean closed her eyes, breathing in the warm, soft scent of cinnamon and pine. Her father had joined in the conversation and the laughter had grown accordingly; there were presents under the big tree in the living room, and four glasses of eggnog imperceptibly souring on the counter two feet away, where she'd left them when the phone rang.   No, she hadn't seen her family for months, and it was Christmas Eve - but they would just have to miss her.

Scott was the priority. He was always the priority.

"Give me five minutes," Jean told Rogue, "and I'll be on my way."


	2. Discontent

_"Now is the winter of our discontent."_

_Richard III_, Act I, Scene I

Storm's holiday present to the citizens of Bayville was going to be a surprise snowfall. The skies had been relatively clear for the last week, but that was all part of the plan. Before leaving for her sister's house, Storm had confided to Rogue that, at midnight, she was going to pull down a massive cold front that would bury most of the tri-state area in a picture-perfect white Christmas.

But snow or not, it was New York in the depths of winter, and it was _cold_. Rogue stood at the front doors and shivered. The cold came right through the insulated glass, and her sweater, and her skin and muscles, cutting at her bones. She was at heart a Southern girl (nevermind that it also snowed in Mississippi), and these crazy Yankee winters were too much sometimes. She didn't know how Jean managed to run from the garage to the front doors without either a jacket or gloves on.

Rogue opened the door for her teammate and shivered harder in the sudden gust of increased cold. Jean blew in with pinked skin and some shivers of her own. The door slammed shut behind her without Rogue's help; telekinesis at work.

"I tried to call everyone but I can't find them," Rogue said before the other girl could say anything. She crossed her arms over her chest and tried not to shiver anymore. "No one's pickin' up at the Daniels', Beast didn't leave a number, and I have no idea where the professor went."

"He didn't tell you?" Jean asked, visibly startled, and with good reason. The professor was a stickler for that kind of thing, especially when there were only two other people in the Institute. And eventually, after Storm had departed, one.

Rogue shrugged; a gesture of one-shouldered eloquence that described perfectly how difficult it was to remember things you heard when you were half-asleep. "He did. I wasn't paying attention."

Jean, rubbing her hands together, threw her an exasperated look. "_That's_ helpful."

"Hey," Rogue snapped, immediately defensive. She pulled tighter into herself. "I didn't know it would turn out to be so _important_."

"I'm sorry," Jean said, wincing. "I'm just - We need help on this."

"I'm not disagreein'." She hated to admit that she was at a loss in this situation - with Scott missing and herself as the person responsible for bringing Jean into it, she wanted to have all the answers, wanted to find Scott on her own - but there it was. She was out of ideas, stuck spinning in circles, and she needed more input. "But we ain't got it, so what are we gonna do?"

Jean took a deep breath. "I hate making decisions. Okay. I'm going down to Cerebro to look for Scott. You get on the computers elsewhere in the house and see if you can find where the professor went."

Rogue thought about it, and agreed. She nodded and went off to the nearest terminal while Jean shed her duffel bag in the foyer and took herself down into the guts of the Institute. The search itself was short; Rogue found the information in the first minute. Professor Xavier had received a call from Haifa, Israel at four in the morning, had gotten onto a commercial flight at five, and that was that.

She wondered, briefly, why a call from someone halfway around the world could get the professor to leave so abruptly on Christmas Eve, but then figured it was none of her business. Instead of looking into it further she headed downstairs to see what Jean had discovered.

The door to the Cerebro room opened as she approached, revealing a tired and frustrated Jean sitting on the flat, perpetually chilled metal panels of the long walkway's terminus. The interface helmet was on her head, but the machine was offline.

"The prof's in Israel," Rogue said, walking in cautiously. Her hopes for easily finding Scott flared and then dimmed as she realized all the possible connotations of Jean's defeated expression. "Did you find him?"

"No," Jean said. She ran a hand through the ends of her hair. "I looked. He's not _anywhere_."

"Cerebro has a limited range," Rogue pointed out.

"Not for me." She rose and carefully replaced the helmet on the console, then brushed off her hands. "With Cerebro amplifying my powers I can 'see' most of the world. And Scott - we have a connection. I should be able to find him no matter where he is."

Rogue tried not to let her surprise show. So the Mexico City thing _hadn't_ been a lucky fluke. Cerebro could pick up on mutant manifestations all over the globe, but that was its most rudimentary function. Using it to search for specific individuals, the professor could push Cerebro to about five thousand miles, maximum. That Jean could take it well beyond was somehow... unsettling.

Almost as unsettling as the rest of Jean's revelation. "What are you sayin'? That he's..."

"No," she said again, much more forcefully. "Scott is alive. We're going to find him. I just... I don't know how. Yet."

A silence fell over the room - a dead silence, leaden and gray, crushing them both under the impossibility of their strange, terrible circumstances. Jean and Rogue had never worked well together under the best of conditions, and these were quite possibly the worse. Rogue could see the other girl trying to think of a plan and failing.

_That's because Scott does the planning_, she thought, carefully holding it to herself in the presence of a telepath. _All_ _**she**_ _can do is use him_.

"You talked to Alex?" Jean asked suddenly, breaking her out of her thoughts.

"Huh? Oh. Yeah, I did. Not for too long, but long enough to get a feel for what happened out there." Rogue had a flash of insight. "Maybe he saw somethin' and I didn't hear about it."

"Maybe." Jean, already biting her lip, fidgeted with her hair again - all that long, lustrous, red hair that Rogue and Kitty had once, in a rare moment of roommate solidarity, plotted to cut off while she was asleep. In Kitty's case, just so she could take showers without having to pull red hair clogs out of the drains; in Rogue's case, just to put a dent in Jean's overdeveloped ego.

"Even if he did, we couldn't really do anything more from here, and there's no way we can get a flight to Honolulu now," Rogue pointed out, deflating her own idea. For a moment she was caught in a surge of depression and general bleakness.

But it had the opposite effect on Jean. She jerked her head up as though someone had electrified her. "Did anyone take the Blackbird?"

Rogue eyed her with a mixture of wariness and outright suspicion. "No. Don't tell me you can fly it."

Scott was the designated pilot, usually doing the flying even when the professor, Beast, Storm or Wolverine were available. Rogue had never seen Jean so much as touch the controls.

Jean gave her a half-smile, at once rueful and sharp-edged. "I've been here since I was twelve. Do you really think the only thing I learned was how to be obnoxiously popular?"

There was no good reply to that so Rogue made none.

"Come on," Jean said, brushing past her on the narrow walkway, heading for the door. "And grab your uniform, too."


	3. Cold Weather

_"Two women placed together makes cold weather." _

_Henry VIII, _Act I, Scene IV

* * *

The note was short and unrepentantly full of lies.

_**Scott missed his flight. We went to get him.**_

Signed, Jean and Rogue.

Rogue had taped it to the front door while Jean had been prepping the Blackbird. It stood out like a white flag on the glass, lonely and forlorn, the herald of an empty house. The long strings of Christmas lights were set on a timer and would come on with sunset, but there would likely be no one dreaming of Storm's winter wonderland in the Xavier Institute that night.

Just to be safe, both Rogue and Jean had packed overnight bags. Jean had simply picked up the thrown-together duffel bag she'd brought from her parents' house, added in a spare uniform, and tossed it into the rear of the Blackbird's forward cabin.

Jean hadn't flown the Blackbird in years, and was somewhat relieved to discover that she could still do it with reasonable skill. It made her feel more keenly the absence of Scott and the fact that they were caught up in a hopeless search for him - they had no beginning and no sight of an end. Only the futility of a desperate flight for answers.

"Ruth Bat-Seraph," Rogue muttered in the co-pilot's chair.

Startled by the non sequiter, Jean asked, "Who?"

Rogue shifted around, clearly uncomfortable in the harness. Or perhaps with the conversation. Or perhaps just being so near to Jean. "The lady who called the professor. I've heard her name before."

"She was in Israel?" Jean asked, simultaneously running over the question, worrying over Scott, and doing the dozens of mental calculations required to fly a multibillion-dollar advanced jet aircraft.

"Haifa, Israel."

Telepaths, as a rule, had photographic memories. Jean remembered the city's name almost immediately. "The professor consulted on a case in Haifa a few years ago. Before you came here. It had something to do with Magneto, I think."

"No, this wasn't about Magneto." Rogue's forehead furrowed with concentration. "Bat-Seraph… Shoot. I'll remember it sooner or later, I guess. Or remember _who_ remembered it."

"You can't tell?"

Rogue shrugged and turned her face away, to look out of the big side window. "Not always. Most of 'em stay separate, but some get confused with me... Not like your powers."

"You'd be surprised," Jean said, quietly, thoughtfully, glancing at her habitually sullen teammate, who shook her head briefly and stared fixedly out of the window. "I've been a lot of people. Twice. When my power first manifested, and again during my power surge. Psychics like you and me can get lost easily."

"I'm not a psychic," Rogue said, mumbling it. "Just a psychic vampire."

Jean's empathy ached for the other girl, and she made an instinctive, compassionate attempt to help. "Rogue-"

"Tell me when we get there," she said abruptly, unbuckling the harness and going to the rear of the cabin. Jean turned around in her chair and watched Rogue settle into one of chairs in the very last row, pull out a pair of headphones from her overnight bag, and start listening to loud, angsty music with her eyes closed.

_What do you see in Scott?_ Jean wondered, turning back around, facing the wide blue sky with its landscape of clouds. _And what would Scott possibly see in you?_

No answers were forthcoming. They flew in silence for the remainder of the three-thousand-plus miles between Bayville and Honolulu. Jean wondered if Rogue felt the pressure of time the way she did: the inexorable ticking away of chances, opportunities, and hope.

How had Scott disappeared? _Why_ had he disappeared? Not voluntarily; he was never so irresponsible or wild as that. The last time he'd gone missing, it was Mystique's fault. Assuming Mystique was even still alive – a big "if" at this point - she had more revenge to take against Rogue now than Scott, and indirect vengeance was not the shapeshifter's style.

Jean had a sickening feeling that whoever had taken Scott, if they were a mutant, was unknown to the X-Men; a new villain or villains would be even more impossible to track. And then, of course, there was always the possibility that he had been a victim of an utterly normal, non-mutant variety of abduction.

Once upon a time, shortly before coming to the Institute, Scott had been involved with some people of highly dubious character. That sorry, sad chapter in his life could easily have come back to burn him again.

That last idea that troubled Jean the most. Mutants she could handle. Mutants she could eventually track down with Cerebro. Mutants, especially notorious ones, had dossiers and files of information on them that she could readily access. Clues to follow. Known bases of operations. Patterns of behavior.

Human criminals would require the political connections and more expert mind of Professor Xavier, and he was busy in Israel, several hours' flight away with the Blackbird. Jean didn't know if they had that much time. She hoped they wouldn't need to find out.

When the Blackbird was thirty minutes from the island of Oahu, where the Masters family lived with their adopted son, Alex Summers, Jean dialed Scott's little brother and told him to meet them on the beach near his house.

"We're two minutes out," she announced to Rogue, who somehow heard her over the blaring music. "I'm going to have to land on the beach - not the best surface, but there's not really anywhere else."

Rogue made her way to the front of the cabin and took her seat in the co-pilot's chair, saying, "As long as we can take off again. Is Alex waitin'?"

Oahu loomed on the horizon - a mound of vibrant, living green against a deep blue desert. Jean began to prep for landing. "He's worried the police will bust us."

Rogue snorted. "They just might."

"If they try, they'll be sorry," Jean said flatly. She was on a mission. Not even the arrival of the United States military would slow her down now.

Rogue eyed her with a sudden surprised respect - staring at Jean for such a long moment that the older girl began to feel self-conscious. "Amen to that," Rogue finally said, firmly, nodding.

They agreed on one thing, at least.


	4. Memory

_"I'll note you in my book of memory."_

_Henry VI, _Act II, Scene IV

* * *

The Masters were out, but Alex was standing on the wide, flat expanse of sand in front of the family home when Jean set the Blackbird down. Rogue lowered the ramp and he scrambled aboard, blond hair tousled by the wind of their downdraft.

"Hey," Alex said to her, pushing his hair out of his face. Rogue nodded in reply, then hung back as Jean gave Scott's little brother a reassuring hug. "Merry Christmas, I guess. I can't stay long - I mean, you guys can't stay long. Mom and Dad still aren't really behind this X-Men thing."

"It's okay," Jean said. "This shouldn't take more than a few minutes."

Alex nodded absently, then blew out a heavy breath. "So what do you want me to tell you?"

"Actually, we want you to _show_ us something," Jean said. She stepped to the controls again and picked up Cerebro's remote interface helmet. Slipping it over her head, she finished, "If it's all right, I'm going to link our minds together and review your memories."

Rogue straightened, alarmed. "Wait - you're gonna bring _me_ inside his head too?"

"Alex saw the plane leave. You saw the plane arrive. Between the two of you, we should be able to put some kind of logical scenario together." Jean sounded more than a little irritated that Rogue hadn't kept up with her thought processes.

_Well, and so what if she is?_ Rogue thought with an inward scowl. This time she didn't try quite so hard to keep the thought to herself.

"Let's do it," Alex said. He didn't seem to have considered that having a novice psychic - even a powerful one like Jean - link three minds was potentially dangerous. Scott would have. Scott would've carefully weighed all the pros and cons of the idea.

And still would've gone for it, with the same damn-the-torpedoes determination that Alex was displaying now. But he would've thought about it first.

"I don't know," Rogue started, reluctant, but when she caught sight of Alex's anxious face, she sighed. "Fine. Let's do it."

Jean lowered herself to the floor of the cabin with a flowing, easy grace that did nothing to make Rogue feel less surly towards her. "If you guys would sit down next to me and hold hands, I think that would make it easier. Rogue, I need you to focus on your own personality, too."

Rogue and Alex obediently arranged themselves across from Jean, so that they made a triangle with her at the apex. Jean reached out for their hands. Feeling more than a little foolish, Rogue took Jean's hand and Alex's too. They were all linked physically. Now the hard part began.

"Close your eyes," Jean murmured, "and relax. This won't hurt."

Rogue knew a thing or two about psychic immersion. It happened to her every time she used her powers - the tidal rush of memories and ideas that belonged to an alien personality. It didn't _hurt_, exactly, but it was uncomfortable. Your mind was already full of _you_, and then it had to stretch to accommodate somebody else. A four-pound sausage in a two-pound skin, as they would've put it back in Caldecott County.

And she hadn't done very well, traditionally, with telepaths poking around in her head. So she closed her eyes and relaxed as per Jean's instructions, but she was secretly waiting for some major discomfort. She didn't feel much more than a momentary lurch and break in her thoughts - like a mental hiccup. And then nothing.

She figured that Jean had screwed something up. Typical.

Rogue opened her eyes, expecting to see the interior of the plane and two zoned-out mutants. Instead she found herself standing in the middle of a bustling airport terminal. Although "standing" wasn't quite the word for it; she was hovering a few feet above the thin carpet. Her body was translucent and glowing faintly green.

Justifiably startled, she looked around quickly and spotted both Jean and Alex hovering some distance overhead, almost to the high ceiling. Alex was glowing orange and Jean's glow was fluctuating from pink to fire red.

_Oh, good. It worked._ Jean floated down. _I was a little worried about you, Rogue - the layered personalities make it difficult to interact with your mind. _

_Yeah, I get that a lot,_ Rogue said back. _So this is Alex's memory? _

_Yes. Scott is at the gate over there,_ Jean said, pointing through the crowd. Rogue saw why they'd been floating well above the heads of the masses; it was impossible to get a clear view from the floor. Now that she was looking more closely, the images of people and the background wavered and blurred, fading out of color to black-and-white, losing and gaining detail.

She shrugged off a tiny qualm and thought her way up to Alex's perch. From there it was easy to spot memory-Alex and Scott.

Scott was laughing at something memory-Alex had said. He had a single backpack slung over his shoulder and looked both relaxed and happy. Rogue felt a pang of something like loss, but shook that off too. Scott wasn't gone yet, she reminded herself.

_Okay,_ Alex said, radiating uncertainty. _We got here way early because Scott was paranoid about the security. He was the last one to board anyway._ Alex glanced down, then looked at Jean. _Can we fast-forward or something? _

_I guess,_ Jean said. _Just keep your eyes open for anything suspicious. You too, Rogue._

Jean's pink-red glow flared brighter and the motion in the terminal abruptly sped up, as if someone had indeed hit fast-forward. People loitered in doubletime, then got up and rapidly filed through the gate.

Rogue checked each passenger against her memories of the New York airport. They all fit the same mold, unfortunately - suntanned (or sunburned) tourists in ultra-casual clothes for the long flight home. Scott stood out, but only because she knew him. She watched him say goodbye to memory-Alex and follow the last few passengers to the gate.

_Hey,_ she said, suddenly on alert, _I don't remember_ _**that**_ _guy! _

The action came to a screeching halt with another flare of Jean's thoughts. _Which guy? _

Rogue dropped down to point an accusing finger at the man directly ahead of Scott. _**Him. **_

The man had caught her attention mostly because he stood out. Alone among the Hawaiian-shirt tourists, he was dressed in a sharp charcoal-gray business suit, complete with a dark red tie. He looked like a shark in a school of clownfish.

Jean and Alex had followed her down and now hovered around the freeze-frame image of the man in the suit. _He wasn't in New York? _

_No way. I didn't see anyone that looked like him. _

_I'm running him through Cerebro,_ Jean said, putting a hand to her forehead. She flickered for a moment, then said, _No luck. I'll try the global databases, but that's going to take a bit longer. _

Rogue decided to leave her alone for that. Instead she turned her attention to Alex, who was hovering around the man with a frown on his astral face.

_Do you think this is the guy?_ he asked her.

_Well, he didn't get off the plane, and neither did Scott. So yeah, I'd say it was him. _

_Gotcha!_ Jean exclaimed. _He went through Customs three days ago, entering the US from France. Georges Lapouge. _

Rogue wasn't nearly as pleased. There went her Christmas in Bayville, it looked like. _So now we're gonna have to go to __**France**__?_

_Maybe not. Georges Vacher de Lapouge was one the early proponents of eugenics,_ Jean said, scowling faintly.

_And for those of us __**not**__ majoring in genetics -?_, Rogue said, impatient.

Jean's scowl deepened, but not, Rogue sensed, as a result of her tone. Rather it was due to the subject matter. _Eugenics is a polite word for 'genocide'. It's the Nazi doctrine - eliminate the genetically 'unfit'. Lapouge wasn't the most visible eugenicist, but he was influential._

_Scott got kidnapped by a guy who named himself after a __**Nazi**__?_ Alex burst out, visibly alarmed - and with good reason, Rogue thought. _We gotta find him! _

_We're __**going**__ to find him_, Jean corrected_, and we're going to bring him home safe and sound. Speaking of which, I'm disconnecting us._

The airport scene dissolved to black, and then Rogue was blinking in the soft interior light of the Blackbird's cabin.


	5. Far Off

_"'Tis far off;_  
_And rather like a dream than an assurance_  
_That my remembrance warrants.__"__  
_

_The Tempest, _Act I, Scene II

* * *

"Oh man," Alex said. He looked a little green around the gills. "That was rough."

Jean rubbed at her forehead, trying to chase away the headache nibbling at her brain. Holding Rogue's fluctuating thought patterns in sync with theirs had been harder than she'd anticipated. "Sorry – I didn't mean it to be so… abrupt."

"Whatever," Rogue said, impatient. "So now we know who took Scott. We just gotta figure out _where_ he took him."

"I'll have Cerebro check to see if Lapouge rented a hotel room or a car or something – although, to be honest, I think that's a long shot." Jean gave the computer its directions, then added another search, this one for anyone using other eugenicists' names.

"It doesn't make any sense," Alex said, frustrated, hunching over his knees. "Why would this guy want to grab Scott?"

_Eugenics_, Jean thought. It meant "well born." In its mildest forms, an expression of social Darwinism; the survival of the fittest race of humans.

But Alex was right: what did that have to do with Scott Summers? Scott was a mutant, but not the most powerful. He didn't even have control over his abilities - which wasn't his fault, of course. It could be that Lapouge was trying to improve the gene pool by removing "weak links"… but there were dozens of mutants with weaker powers and still less control.

The pieces weren't sticking together.

She closed her eyes while Cerebro ran through its search, and focused on the mental image of Lapouge standing in the terminal. Black hair, gray suit. That deep red tie… the color of heart's blood. In her mind she circled down to see his face – blurry because Alex hadn't remembered it exactly – and peered into the dark shadows where his eyes would be.

Something cold danced down her spine.

Cerebro beeped. Jean opened her eyes and took a deep, slow breath as she scanned the results, forcing her heartbeat to calm down. "No luck," she reported to the others. "The only thing on Lapouge is his plane ticket and passport."

Rogue got to her feet with a scowl. "So it's an alias. Okay, fine. We know who took Scott and when and where he grabbed him. We'll just have to do some detective work on the next part. Either Lapouge took Scott off the island, or –"

"- or he's still here!" Alex exclaimed, jumping to his feet. "Yeah! There're lots of places to hide out on the island. Maybe they're on a boat or something. Maybe we can still catch them!"

Jean's headache tightened its screws around her temples. "I don't know," she said. She stood up as well, even though it left her feeling a little wobbly. "The last thing we need to do right now is go off on a wild goose chase."

"I agree," Rogue said. Jean looked at her and the other girl shrugged, a wry grin playing on her mouth. "Yeah, I know. But you're right, Jean. It doesn't make any sense for him to stick around – not if he knew about Scott. He'd have to know the X-Men would be comin'."

Alex looked at both of them. "But maybe Lapouge knew that's what we'd think, so he did the opposite just to throw us off the trail. You think?"

_Too many spy movies, is what I think_, Rogue thought clearly in Jean's direction. Out loud the younger girl said, "All I know is, I'd feel a lot better if you came along with us."

"Give you guys a little firepower?" Alex said, cracking a grin for the first time. He raised his hands, which glowed briefly, fiercely, with shifting orange energy, and his expression sobered into something grimmer, more determined – more Scott-like. "I'm with you. Whatever it takes."

Lapouge's face flashed into Jean's mind again, shadowed eyes glittering. The cabin seemed to tilt and darken and she heard a man's voice echoing faintly.

_...Next on the list… next on the list…_

"No!" she said, startling herself with her vehemence. Alex and Rogue looked surprised, too. Jean realized she was sweating and her fingers were shaking. She took off the interface helmet and held onto it tightly. "No," she repeated, in something approximating a normal voice. "I mean… it's a bad idea for you to come with us."

"We could use the help," Rogue said, frowning at her.

"Jean, I want to," Alex said. "He's my _brother_ – there's no way I'm gonna sit on the beach and do nothing. I'm coming with you."

The cold, twisty feeling slithered around into Jean's heart and squeezed. She gasped and tried to hide it in a cough. _No_, she thought, fighting down a surge of unreasonable fear. She knew – she _knew_ – that Scott was not on Oahu anymore, and she _knew_ that Alex could not, under any circumstances, go with them.

She didn't know _how_ she knew, but she did, and a feeling that strong…

A telepath learned to trust their instincts.

"N-no," she said. Her fingers were still trembling, and her knuckles had gone white against the smooth silver curve of the helmet. She took another deep breath. _Steady, Jean_. "No. We'll be fine. Alex, you should stay here. And check. For anything- suspicious."

Alex frowned, puzzled and worried. "You're sure?"

"Yes. Scott might be here on the island, or he might be somewhere else. So we split up and cover more ground. And, this way, if – something happens, and the other X-Men come looking for us, you can tell them what we learned."

Rogue asked, narrow-eyed, "You're _sure?_"

_He can't come with us_, Jean said. _It's too dangerous. I can't explain how I know that, but believe me, bringing Alex is the worst thing we could do_.

_We really could use his help._

Jean countered, _We really don't want Lapouge to get hold of him __**and**__ Scott._

"Good point," Rogue said out loud, then clapped a hand over her mouth. "Uh… never mind," she said to Alex, who was too preoccupied with worry to notice.

Jean put the helmet away and stood, giving Alex a big hug. "We'll find him. Whatever it takes, right? Now, you'd better get back to your family before your dad calls the cops."

Alex squeezed her tightly. "Tell him I said – sorry. For not watching his back."

"Oh, Alex," Jean said. "It's not your fault. It's not anyone's fault."

"No. It's _someone's_ fault, all right," Rogue said. "And we're gonna make 'em sorry."

Alex nodded - reluctantly. "Give them one for me, okay?"

"We will," Jean and Rogue said at the same moment.

Alex stood at the top of the ramp for a moment, exhaled, squared his shoulders, and walked down as if it was the most difficult thing he'd ever done. It probably was.

Jean retook her seat in the pilot's chair and began spinning up the engines.

Rogue made sure the ramp was up and locked and settled in next to her. They took off in a muted blast of downdraft and whipped-up sand.

Through the corner of the windshield, Jean saw Alex run after the jet until he splashed into the ocean. Then he stopped, raised a hand in farewell, and stood watching them fly away without him.

Her heart ached for him and burned in fury against the person who'd taken Scott, for causing this mess in the first place. She felt like she should've fixed things already, like she should've at least comforted Alex more.

But there was nothing else they could do in Hawai'i.

Jean set their course east, towards the mainland. Out over the Pacific, her nascent headache - successfully held at bay thus far - came roaring to full, agonizing life.

Her vision blurred and she gripped the controls harder.

In the co-pilot's chair, Rogue chewed at her lip. "What are we gonna do _now_?"

"I don't know," Jean said. Colorful spots danced around the periphery of her vision. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her hand to her forehead. "I'm sorry, I just – I can't think straight – my head is killing me."

"There should be some aspirin in the first-aid kit," Rogue said, unfastening her harness and standing.

"No – it's not –" The pain accelerated, whirling down around her and bringing a wave of blackness with it. She fumbled to set the autopilot, but her fingers weren't working any more, and they slipped off the instrument panel.

No. She had to… she had to…

_Scott! Help me!_

Jean made one last desperate lunge at consciousness, and fell into the void.

---

_The colors are the last thing she sees. _

_The landscape fades in around her - sounds, then smells, then sensations, then finally the sight of the place. _

_Birdsongs. Chirping insects. No traffic save for the far-off drone of a small engine. _

_Sun-warmed grass, some of it freshly cut. Clean air - country air. A few faint scents that might be flowers. _

_Dirt, also warm, beneath her bare feet, long grass brushing her legs and fingers, gentle heat on her arms and face. _

_Green-yellow fields, rolling away in slow undulations. Blue sky, barely scraped with vague ideas of clouds. No trees. No houses. A horizon that is even further away than the engine. _

_And Scott. In the dream she is not surprised to see him. He's not missing here. He's very patently right in front of her, watching her with a half-grin on his face. _

_"It's so big," she says, turning around with her face tipped to the sun, holding out her arms to take in all of this place. "It's beautiful here." _

_He's still watching her, and says softly, voice low, "You're beautiful." _

_She flushes, embarrassed and pleased all at once, and drops her head so that she is looking more at the grass than the sun, and only glancingly at him. "Thanks for bringing me here." _

_"I had to," he says, taking her hands and so forcing her to look him in the eyes. His glasses sparkle, brilliant rubies in the summer sun. "I mean, you can't understand where I am now without knowing where I've been." _

_"I want to understand you," she says, very serious. She thinks she already does but there's always more to learn; he holds his secrets so very dear. "I want to spend my whole life with you." _

_His half-grin breaks into a wide smile, a rare thing for him, and before she can do or say anything else, he pulls her close and kisses her, hard, fiercely, so that a bright surge of white heat runs the length of her nervous system - all the way to the tips of her fingers and toes. She kisses him back just as hard, but it ends far too soon for her liking, and he pulls away. _

_He is suddenly playful - an extremely rare thing for him - and grabs one of her hands, tugging her after him. "Come on!" _

_She follows, stumbling a little on the unfamiliar ground, laughing, exhilarated as always by the simple truth of love. "Where are we going?" _

_"I want to show you something," he says. Rubies sparkle. _

_They climb one of the low hills and a house abruptly rears up on the horizon. It's close - closer than she was expecting anything to be in this vast field - and she startles backwards, hand slipping free of Scott's. _

_It's a stately three-story house, very similar to the Institute in size and shape, sitting on the crest of another wrinkle of a hill. There are big stone chimneys and a few outbuildings. The exterior walls are weatherbeaten and losing paint in uneven swaths. The roof is shedding its handsome slate shingles and weeds are choking the front entrance. Bits of rusting playground equipment are scattered around; a broken swing sways back and forth in the breeze. _

_It could be picturesque but she feels a blackened aura around it - a presence that makes her skin crawl. _

_The flawless summer day dims perceptibly. _

_"What is it?" she asks. _

_"I lived here," he says, taking her hand again, still lighthearted as though he can't sense the dark things lurking around the old house. "When I was a kid. Come on, I'll show you my room." _

_"I don't think we should go in there," she says slowly, apprehensive, but there's no stopping him now, and he pulls her reluctantly closer. _

_The dark aura intensifies as they push through the weeds to the front door. The wood door is splintered and beginning to rot away from age and lack of maintenance. It hangs from one hinge, creaking idly, irregularly, in the faint breeze. _

_The gaping black maw of the house beyond the door threatens to reach out and swallow her whole. There are twisted, rotting things inside, evil things, things that will do them harm. Behind her, the sky has turned gray and menacing, and the green grass has shriveled and died into brown paper stalks. _

_"Scott, I don't want to go in there," she says more firmly. She is starting to panic. _

_His face goes blank. "But you have to see it, Jean." _

_"I don't want to!" She jerks her hand free and turns to run, but realizes that he isn't moving. "Scott! You can't go in there!" _

_"Jean. I'll be here if you change your mind," he says, and walks through the door. He doesn't look back.  
_

_"No!" she shrieks. "Scott, wait! __**Scott!**__" _

_It's too late. He's gone. The landscape hangs still for a moment, then shatters as through someone has thrown a rock through a pane of glass. _

_Distant laughter, faint and mocking, echoes over the glittering shards._

_---_

She came to on the cabin floor with a gasp and a name on her lips: "Scott!"

"Jean! Jean, are you okay?" Rogue asked, voice panicked, kneeling down beside her.   "You just collapsed – I got the autopilot working, but I can't fly this thing –"

"Sage, Nebraska," Jean said, cutting her off. The other girl looked at her blankly and Jean repeated herself, hardly believing her own words. "Scott is in Sage, Nebraska. The Milbury Boys' Home."

Rogue sat there for a moment longer, then sprung into sudden action, scrambling to change out of her clothes for the X-Men uniform. "So what're we waiting for? Let's go!"


	6. These Confines

_"…And drop into the rotten mouth of death._  
_Here in these confines slyly have I lurk'd_  
_To watch the waning of mine enemies."_

_Richard III, _Act IV, Scene IV

* * *

If winter in Bayville, New York had been cold, winter in Sage, Nebraska was freezing. The X-Men uniforms were all insulated, but not proof against the howling sub-zero wind. Jean and Rogue dug a pair of heavy jackets out of the Blackbird's rear cabin storage before venturing outside the jet. Even then, the temperature nearly sucked the breath from Rogue's lungs.

"It wasn't this cold at Asteroid M!" she exclaimed through chattering teeth. They'd set the jet down well out of sight of the decrepit building that Jean and county records had identified as the former Milbury Boy's Home. Now they were trudging across the snow-covered fields - and not using any powers, just in case. That was a shame, because a telekinetic snow plow would've helped immensely.

"It wasn't December when we were at Asteroid M," Jean countered. She had a fierce look of concentration on her face, struggling through the knee-high snow, and all that long red hair was whipping around like crazy; she looked like someone else, someone who wasn't a snotty popular rich girl. "Even if it _was_ above the Arctic Circle."

Rogue nodded - or maybe she just shivered violently, it was hard to tell anymore - and kept her mouth shut for the rest of the trek. Talking wasted valuable heat.

The house was a dark, hulking shape against the white and gray of the landscape. The sun was setting, staining the sky beyond a bloody red. They approached the building cautiously, circling in the way Wolverine always recommended, but eventually waded through the snow to the front entrance.

Jean paused at the threshold of the gaping front door. The hallway beyond was buried in deep shadow; all Rogue could see was a badly faded strip of carpet leading into the inky blackness. "We should get in and out as fast as possible. I don't want to be here after dark."

"I don't want to be here at all," Rogue muttered. The house was giving off evil vibes like it was getting paid for it. "It's _already_ dark."

"You can feel it?" Jean asked. She both sounded and looked surprised.

Rogue stared at her for a moment, then wrinkled up her nose. "How could I not?"

Jean opened her mouth, shut it, and just shrugged. "Let's go."

They stepped into the house and paused, waiting for a second for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. It was warmer inside, but only because there was no bone-cutting wind; the first floor seemed to be in pretty good shape. Still, the house creaked and moaned above them. Rogue caught a strong whiff of decay and tried to breathe through her mouth instead, which didn't help. "Somethin' died in here," she whispered.

"I think... a lot of things died," Jean whispered back. Their voices sounded hushed and scared against the rotting walls and ceiling of the hallway.

_Two fool girls in a haunted house_, Rogue thought, _all but jumping at shadow monsters_. What she said was, "I hope none of 'em were people."

Then they began to make their way down the long strip of molding carpet, Jean looking ahead and Rogue watching their backs, pausing at each door to check the room beyond.

Some of the rooms were more or less intact – the dining room, for instance. The doors leading to other rooms were missing, but the table was in one piece and the chairs scattered around it hadn't been completely broken down. Unfaded squares of wallpaper still showed where pictures had hung, once upon a time.

Other rooms were wrecked. The glass in the windows had been smashed, and time, weather, and animals had each taken their toll. Doors leaned precariously on frames or lay decaying on the floor. Upholstery was water-damaged and sometimes shredded, with the stuffing bursting out. A former office was a monument to scattered, stained papers.

The last room they checked on the first floor turned out to be the library. The heavy wood doors were intact, but the room itself was a total loss. Books had been knocked off shelves and used as nests, food, anything. The armchairs and small tables were in pieces, tossed everywhere. In one corner, there was a projecting dormer window that must've once been a cozy reading nook. But the ceiling over it had partially collapsed some unknown time before; snow was piled in stark white drifts beneath the hole. Every now and then, a gust of wind would howl down through the ceiling and deposit more snow and a lot more cold. Daring them, almost, to try to use the room for its original purpose.

"It's a ghost house," Rogue murmured. She bent down and picked up one of the ruined books, brushing snow and dirt off the cover with numb fingers. _Hereditary Genius._ Sounded pretentious. Sounded like a good book for a spooky old house.

She flipped it open. The pages inside were so badly waterstained that only a few snatches of words were legible.

…_else, so it …. be quite practicable to produce … _

… _highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages ... _

…_several consecutive generations…_

It made her think of Georges Lapouge, the eugenicist - or at least the shark-suited guy who'd borrowed his name. Unease mixed with adrenaline prickled along her spine. _I guess this means we're on the right trail_, she thought.

Problem was, there wasn't much light coming in anymore. They were running out of daytime, and they hadn't found any sign of a recent human presence. Being on the right trail wasn't going to do them any good unless they -

Jean gasped. "Scott's here!"

Surprised, Rogue let the book fall again and turned to the other girl. The rush of hope was sudden and a little ridiculous. "Can you feel him?"

"Yes," she said, excited, then frowned. She had her eyes squeezed tightly shut and both hands pressed to her temples. "No – now it's gone. But he's _here_, Rogue, I could feel him. And he's alive!"

"All _right_!" Rogue exclaimed. "Where?"

Jean opened her eyes and looked around the ruined library. "Um… the cellar, I think."

"Good, 'cause there's nothin' I like better than wandering around the basement of a scary abandoned house."

Jean gave a little laugh. "I was thinking the same thing."

They exchanged uneasy grins, then made their way out of the library and into the hallway, and from there back outside. Jean found the cellar doors – a muffled triangle against the side of the house - and telekinetically shoved the thick layer of snow away.

Rogue was expecting the cellar doors to be the same disintegrating construction as the rest of the Milbury Boys' Home.

They weren't.

The doors were metal. Brushed steel. Solid and heavy. Time had put a few nicks on their surface, but overall they were the best-preserved thing Rogue had seen so far. And there was a thick cable lock around the handles.

"Kinda hardcore for this place," Rogue said, gesturing at the broken-down house and empty fields.

"I know. We're definitely on the right track," Jean said.

Rogue bent down and tugged at the cable. It weighed a ton. "How do we get in?"

"Leave that to me." Jean put her hands to her temples and took a breath. The cable abruptly snapped in two, severed as cleanly as if by a razor.

Rogue pulled it free of the handles and tugged one door open. It fell to the side with a bang that was quickly swallowed by the snow but echoed throughout the dark space beyond. The house had smelled musty, but the cellar reeked of harsh chemicals.

"This place just gets creepier," Rogue muttered. Louder, she said, "I think there's flashlights in the Black-"

There was a loud, feral roar and then a surging blur of fur, claws, and muscles exploded from the dark cellar.

_It's Sabretooth!_ Jean cried, and that was the last thing Rogue knew before the lights went out.


	7. Fair Terms

_"I like not fair terms and a villain's mind." _

_The Merchant of Venice, _Act I, Scene III

* * *

Jean came awake and wished she hadn't; her head was throbbing, making it difficult to think with any sort of clarity. Her eyes flickered open, and immediately shut again under the glaring onslaught of fluorescent lights. This was much worse than her earlier headache, and she didn't think a psychic blackout dream was going to magically resolve it.

"Awake, I see," a man's voice said nearby. He sounded pleased. He sounded pleasant: a smooth, rich baritone with a slight accent. A cultured voice. A respectable voice. A doctor's voice.

She opened her eyes again, more cautiously this time. Blinking, she tried to figure out where she was. It seemed to be... a hospital room?

No, not quite, she realized as her eyes adjusted. The walls she could see were polished metal; the overhead lights blazed with operating-room intensity. She was lying on a steel table (_like an autopsy table_, she thought involuntarily), not a proper bed. There was an instrument tray to one side of the table, with rows of syringes, scalpels, and other assorted equipment.

And she was strapped down: restrained at her wrists and ankles. There was something on her head, too, that felt like a metal band. It dug slightly into the skin of her forehead and pinched her temples.

But the smell of the place - bleached and antiseptic – that was like a hospital.

Or a lab.

Or a morgue.

"Where am I? Where are my friends?" she demanded, although she couldn't see who'd spoken. "Who are you?"

"Oh, you already know the answers to those questions, Jean Grey." The man moved into her field of view. He was tall, handsome and dark-haired, wearing a white lab coat and surgical gloves over his gray suit and red tie.

Jean narrowed her eyes, in part due to anger and in part to see him better against the white-hot glare of the overhead lights. But his face remained partly shadowed, no matter how hard she looked. "Lapouge."

He smiled, displaying excellent teeth. "You _are_ a clever girl, finding that breadcrumb. _Brava_! But Lapouge was a monumental fool, I'm afraid. Call me Milbury instead."

Where was Scott? Or Rogue? She tried to search for their thought patterns and received a lot of mental static in return for her trouble. _Focus, Jean_. Her head wasn't hurting _that_ badly. "If Lapouge was that stupid…"

"Why use his name in the first place? Simple nostalgia," he said. He assumed a slightly chagrined air, as though he'd admitted a weakness. "Those were heady times, my dear. All sorts of new ideas, new paradigms – mostly flawed, of course. The early eugenicists confused genetic worth with race and social order. _Homo europaeus_, _Homo alpinus_… Nonsense, as you know, being so interested in the subject yourself."

He knew her major? She tried to remember if the university records were public... They couldn't be. Could they? Because if they weren't, they had just entered an entirely new level of creepy.

Milbury hadn't noticed her lapse in attention. He went on, saying, "Wyndham, at least, had the sense to recognize that evolution does not automatically favor blond-haired, blue-eyed _Deutschlanders_, or even humans in general, although his later work was not what I could have hoped for."

_Keep him talking_, Jean thought desperately. She called out to Scott and Rogue, again, and got nothing, again. The throbbing intensified, as did her fear. Something was going wrong. Something was going very, very wrong.

Still. _Keep him talking_. "What – um, what do you hope for?"

Milbury smiled beatifically. He spread his hands, palms upturned. "Life. It's so precious, isn't it? So beautiful. And there are so many fools out there who are doing their best to end it, one way or another. You and I, in fact, have a mutual acquaintance who's just embarked on an extremely stupid project."

Jean couldn't begin to guess who their "mutual acquaintance" might be. "Is that why you kidnapped Scott?"

"Very clever!" Milbury said approvingly. "Yes. But I don't want you to feel slighted, Jean. You, of course, were next on the list. _'__There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female.'_ That sort of thing."

"What's… what's going to happen now?" she asked. _Next on the list_… echoing in that smooth voice… she'd heard that before. Hadn't she?

Milbury's expression and voice didn't change, but something in the room chilled perceptibly as he answered: "Forty days and forty nights. Or perhaps years. It depends on whether our friend is as successful as he wishes. But you, Jean Grey, you have nothing whatsoever to worry about. You're quite safe here."

Funny; Jean didn't_ feel _particularly safe. Especially not with Milbury hovering over the instrument tray. "We're at the Boys' Home, aren't we?"

Milbury picked up a hypodermic needle from the tray and uncapped it. "Yes and no. It's complicated, my dear, that's all you need to know."

Absolutely certain of it – even though she still didn't know _how_ – she said, "Scott is here."

Milbury made a humming noise that might have been agreement. He set the hypodermic down beside a couple of test tubes with purple caps, and picked up an antiseptic swab. "Your 'Rogue' is not. It's an interesting mutation, on paper, and it could certainly prove fruitful with some judicious adjustments. In her current state, however…. Hmm. A bit of an evolutionary non-starter, isn't it? – not being able to touch anyone? Still, I've found a way to make her useful."

"How?" Jean asked, unable to keep the fear out of her voice as Milbury rolled the sleeve of her uniform up and ran the antiseptic swab over the inside of her elbow. He'd obviously done it many times before – his movements were elegant and economical, no motion wasted. Jean didn't find that reassuring.

"She'll be teaching my pet," he said jovially, taking up the hypodermic and a test tube, "how to play cat-and-mouse. Now, I'd appreciate your cooperation on this, Jean. It's just a blood sample for my records. There's no reason to fight."

That's what _he_ thought. She gathered together her muddled thoughts and shoved them out at Milbury's chest, intending to knock him across the room.

A faint breeze rippled over his lab coat and he took a fractional step back. At the same moment a sharp pain ripped through Jean's skull like a shaft of red lightning.

She screamed.

Milbury tsked. "While I admire your spirit, my dear, I must confess to some disappointment. I'd thought you were more reasonable than this. Well. That _is_ what the neural scrambler is for."

The pain faded somewhat, leaving her gasping and weak. Her eyes had teared involuntarily and now she blinked them clear. "You… You're blocking… my powers?"

He flashed another perfect smile. "Of course. Hold still, please."

Anger surged up, obliterating the fear if not the lingering pain, but she swallowed the desire to fight. It wouldn't get her anywhere and might prevent her from acting when she had the chance.

Because she would: she was going to make this man very, very sorry.

Milbury slid the hypodermic needle into her vein with expert grace; she barely felt it. He drew enough blood to fill the test tube, then removed it and popped in the second, empty tube. He filled that one, removed it, then withdrew the needle and laid it aside. In the same motion, he produced a cotton ball and a small roll of elastic bandage. He pressed the cotton against the puncture site, wrapped the bandage around her arm, and tied it off.

The entire procedure had taken less than thirty seconds. It was long enough for Jean's clouded brain to turn, worriedly, to Rogue. "Playing cat-and-mouse" – obviously, Milbury had given her over to Sabretooth. Jean just had to hope that Rogue could hold her own for a while.

She pulled her thoughts together and demanded, "I want to see Scott _right now_."

"'An eye like Mars, to threaten and command'," he quoted, instead of answering. "And the sun and the moon, in trying to rescue Mars from dire evil, have fallen into the trap themselves. 'What fools these mortals be!'"

She'd been living under the same roof as Henry McCoy for much too long. Even with her mind struggling through an electric fog, the retort, "'What, can the devil speak true?'" popped out almost instantly.

Milbury laughed.

It was unexpectedly genuine. Warm. Affectionate, even.

He was serious, she realized with a sick internal jolt. All that talk about protecting them - it was true; he'd meant every word. That knowledge was more terrifying than anything else.

Almost.

She had to steel herself to ask the million-dollar question. "Why do you need my blood?"

"Because Charles Xavier is not the only one with a dream for the future, my dear. And because time is running a bit short these days." He picked up the test tubes and held them for Jean to see. The glass sparkled in the bright light, but the blood itself looked dark.

"Excuse me for a moment," Milbury said, every inch the amiable, avuncular doctor. "You'll understand why I need to get these into cold storage."

He walked out of sight, his shoes clicking on the floor. A door swished opened and then shut.

Silence.

Jean was alone.

She closed her eyes and tried desperately to focus. Pain was nothing; she could work past that; she might be Rogue and Scott's only hope. She had to-

"Get up!" a girl's voice hissed in her ear. "We don't have much time!"


	8. Hunt

_"From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept  
A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death…"_

_Richard III, _Act IV, Scene IV

* * *

Rogue had planned to spend her Christmas Eve curled up on the sofa, basking in the warmth of a mug of hot chocolate (with extra chocolate and those little marshmallows), watching mindless holiday programming on the TV while she tried to ignore the fact that she was all alone. Again.

Instead, here she was, drifting in and out of unconsciousness, lying on the freezing, filthy attic floor of a tumbledown orphanage in Sage, Nebraska, with her hands tied behind her back and her feet shackled and someone jabbing a really big needle into her arm.

"Ow!" she yelped, and twitched away involuntarily.

"Don't flail around," a man's voice said. It was a distinguished, educated voice, but it was colder than the attic. "It isn't dignified. And it might attract the attentions of a dangerous predator."

Rogue craned her head around as far as she could, blinking the last shreds of oblivion away. Intermittent gasps of moonlight danced silver-white across the otherwise pitch-black attic; she couldn't see the man at all, but at the far corner of her vision a large, hairy shape moved.

A faint growl. Sabretooth.

_Suddenly a lonely Christmas looks pretty good,_ she thought, with a purely internal shiver, _if I'm gonna have company like this._

"Who are you?" she demanded. Her breath made desperate little clouds. "Where's Scott and Jean? I know they're here!"

"Scott and Jean are doing their part to improve the gene pool. As will you – by removing yourself from it." The man pulled the needle out and said, "Thirty seconds after I leave, your restraints will unlock. After that, you are free to exit the property, or to search for your teammates. Provided, of course, that our friend Victor does not… intercept you first. Try not to disappoint, hm?"

She heard him stand up and walk away, shoes crunching on the littered, decaying surface of the floor. Evidently Sabretooth went with him, because the growling trailed off.

Okay. Okay okay okay. Thirty seconds to come up with a plan. Twenty seconds to put it into gear. She could do this. This was what all the Danger Room crap was for, right? Of course.

The slight pressure on her wrists and ankles gave way. She sat up, stripping the things off, getting up and running in the same motion. The cold made her clumsy, but terror made her fast enough for it not to matter.

She did _not_ want to take this fight onto the roof – Sabretooth wouldn't think twice about a three-story drop, but she certainly would – so she looked frantically for a way into the house proper. She found a big hole in the attic floor, jumped down, landed lightly in a crouch, and took off running towards where she thought the stairs would be.

Her plan was _don't die; find Jean; rescue Scott_. How exactly she was going to accomplish all that, she didn't know, but Phase One definitely involved escaping the Boys' Home.

She careened around a hallway corner and put on the brakes in a hurry.

She'd found the stairs. Problem was, the stairs were half gone: rotted away into a gaping black pit, several feet across and edged with splintered wood.

A feral roar from above. The floor started shaking.

Her twenty seconds were up.

Rogue backed up a few feet, ran for the stairs and pushed off with her right foot. She didn't try for the far side of the pit because she knew she'd never make the distance. Instead, she aimed for the wall, which seemed to be more structurally sound than the stairs themselves, and ricocheted from that.

Her feet hit the rotting stairs at the edge of the pit. The boards gave way with a sharp _crack!_ and suddenly she was falling. She caught herself – barely – with one gloved hand, numb fingers scrabbling to get a better grip on the old wood. It creaked and groaned perilously.

She looked down at the black void underneath her dangling toes, trying to miraculously develop night vision or x-ray vision or some other kind of _useful_ mutant power. Nothing. There might be fifty feather mattresses down there, or a thousand razor-sharp spikes. It might go all the way down to the cellar, in which case she'd break her neck.

_Telekinesis sure would be nice_, she thought, suddenly (and for the first time ever) wishing that Jean was still around.

Above and behind her, Sabretooth reached the top of the stairs. His growl sounded like a laugh.

Rogue let go.

It wasn't as long a drop as she'd feared. No feather mattresses, but no spikes – just a lot of rotted-out wood and trash. She kept her knees bent, rolled with the impact (the thick, padded jacket helped) and came up running, because Sabretooth was already jumping down after her.

There was moonlight seeping in through the windows on this floor, enough to see by. The layout of the hallways and rooms looked familiar –

Of course - it was the first floor.

She felt a quick pulse of hope; maybe this wouldn't play out like a National Geographic nature documentary after all. With that fortifying her, she quickly got her bearings amidst the shambled rooms and started for the front door.

Before she could go more than a few steps, Sabretooth appeared in the hallway ahead of her.

She gasped and skidded to a halt. "What the heck –!"

Behind her came a low, angry growl. She whirled and sure enough, there was Sabretooth, crouched in the stair debris. Facing front again, she saw Sabretooth flex his clawed fingers and snarl.

"Okay," she said, voice loud with panic, whipping her head back and forth, trying to keep both Sabretooths in her field of vision at the same time, "what's goin' on here?"

The Sabretooth in front of her tensed and then leaped with a roar.

The Sabretooth behind her did the same thing.

Stuck in the middle, Rogue did the only thing she could think of: dove through the doorway next to her, tucked and rolled into a crouch on the floor of the dining room. Just in the nick of time, too – the other two mutants collided right where she'd been standing in a hairy, feral frenzy of fangs and slashing talons.

They were so busy fighting each other, they didn't notice Rogue get to her feet. After a half-moment of bewildered gawking – _**what**__ is going on?_ – she made a break for one of the adjoining rooms.

The front door was clearly no longer an exit option. But there were other ways out…

Preoccupied with navigating the debris field of the first-floor rooms, and plotting her alternate exit, she almost didn't see the movement. Her guardian angels must have been working overtime, however, because the brief flash of moonlight on long yellow hair caught at the very edge of her vision. Without thinking, without slowing down, she shifted her weight to one side and spun neatly around the third Sabretooth's slash-and-grab move.

It was a beautiful shake, and under other circumstances she would have been grateful for tagging, somewhere along the way, a football running back with real talent. Just at the moment, she had more urgent concerns to focus on.

Like, for instance, two more Sabretooths looming up in the hallway right in front of her.

She skidded to a stop and scrambled backwards instinctively. So far her instincts had done well, but that lucky streak was over.

"This is gettin' _ridiculous_," she exclaimed, or started to; the last word ended in an unheroic yelp as a clawed hand dug into the back of her jacket and lifted her clear of the floor. Caught by the Sabretooth she'd just evaded.

The other two didn't like that at all. There was a lot of growling, roaring, and posturing, as if the three identical mutants were alpha dogs contesting a particularly juicy bone.

Not a cheery thought for the person representing the bone.

Rogue had to get out of there. _Now_.

She ducked and twisted out of the jacket, landing on her feet. The third Sabretooth, the one she had juked around only seconds ago, wasn't expecting that trick either; the surprised look on his face was almost funny. Rogue whipped her foot up and around and planted the heel of her boot in his solar plexus, then followed it with the other, striking up under his jaw.

He staggered back, shaking his head, dazed. Instantly, the fourth Sabretooth jumped on him with a malicious, vicious roar. Like the first pair, they seemed interested only in tearing something apart, with no distinctions between prey and fellow predator.

The fifth Sabretooth lunged, then checked himself before he joined the melee. He turned to face Rogue instead, grinning with all of his sharp teeth, and flexed his clawed fingers wide.

But he didn't move.

She wasn't stupid enough to think that she was free and clear. He was toying with her: a cat tormenting a mouse.

She wondered if he was the one that had been in the attic at the beginning. She wondered, with a surge of irrational annoyance, _why_, in that case, there were four others trying to filet her.

Never mind _how_!

Not that it ultimately mattered. Dead was dead.

Rogue narrowed her eyes.

The fifth Sabretooth shifted into a crouched stance, poised to attack.

_You are free to exit the property… provided, of course, that our friend Victor does not intercept you first._

She turned and ran. She had to hope that her friend Victor would let the game go on long enough to reach the alternate exit.

The library. The library with its caved-in ceiling – she could get in there, barricade those heavy doors somehow, climb out, and go back to the cellar, where Scott and Jean almost _had_ to be.

Either she or Jean had left the doors open a crack. Dim light reflected and bounced off of the snowfall inside, making the library glow almost painfully bright in the dark house. Rogue put on a burst of desperate speed. She was almost there -

There was a grunt behind her and then something heavy and blunt slammed into her back. Knocked her off her feet and the wind from her lungs.

Momentum kept her going. She tumbled across the decaying carpet and slammed into the base of the bookshelf. The impact alone made her see stars, but things sure didn't improve when several heavy old books fell off and hit her. She shook her head clear and tried to get up.

Before she had her feet under her again, there was a throaty chuckle that ended as a growl, and a big, clawed hand grabbed her arm and jerked her into the air. She dangled there, like a puppet, like a rag doll, helpless and caught.

"Let me _go!_" she cried, even though she knew it was useless. She struck at his arm with her free hand and kicked out at his abdomen. All the blows connected solidly, but showed no effect.

Sabretooth's lips curled back in a pleased snarl.

Okay; she was in major trouble now. Time to deploy her last line of defense – the one that was going to leave her with way too much body hair.

She stripped her glove off with her teeth and slapped her bare hand down onto the arm holding her aloft.

Rogue braced for the memory rush. She saw, like a filmstrip in reverse, this Sabretooth hunting her through the house, taking orders from the guy with the needles, and she saw Sabretooth moving Jean and herself, attacking them at the cellar door, waking up from a long cold stretch of nothing –

- and that was it.

_This isn't right_, she thought, smack in the middle of the power transfer. She'd stolen Sabretooth's mind before, and there'd been big blank spots, yeah, places where the filmstrip had been patched and edited so many times that it had just fallen apart. But this time the memories ran back no more than a few hours.

It was like… it was like he hadn't even existed before today.

"You're not Sabretooth," she said, new fangs making the words sound mushy. "_None_ of you were him. What the heck _are_ you?"

Fake-Sabretooth staggered around, disoriented from her touch, then collapsed with a rattling moan that almost sounded like a snore.

Rogue stared at his body for a long moment, trying to think of a plausible - or even implausible - answer to the mystery, then gave it up for the time being.

She looked around the library. It was snowing now and the ambient moonlight was pretty much gone – but even without her jacket, she didn't feel the cold, and she could still see just fine. There were, she admitted reluctantly, some perks to this set of mutant powers.

She used more of her new powers to easily bound through the hole in the ceiling, cut across the snow to the cellar doors, and yank those suckers open.

As soon as she set foot in the darkness, it all changed. The dim, generic basement was replaced by a gleaming, high-tech facility. Holograms? Whatever it was, her superpowered senses didn't like it. She found herself growling.

Then she took a deep sniff of the air and nearly gasped at the information that flooded in. _Scott!_ He was here – Jean had been totally right about that.

"First time for everything," she said, then coughed and snarled at the scratchy, mangled sound of her own voice.

She took another sniff, to make sure of her direction, and ran.


	9. Withhold

_"Who should withhold me?  
Not fate, obedience, nor the hand of Mars  
Beckoning with fiery truncheon my retire…"_

_Troilus and Cressida _Act V Scene III

* * *

The girl was Jean's age – maybe slightly younger – and Jean did not question her arrival.

For one thing, she didn't have the chance; the girl opened the restraints with some sort of handheld computer, urged Jean off the steel table, and within seconds was half-dragging her out of the room and down a series of short corridors paneled in the same polished, gleaming metal.

For another, her brain was too busy trying to remember how to walk without falling down to worry about who, exactly, was helping her. The neural scrambler was apparently not limited to blocking her mutant powers; it was also disrupting her normal brain functions, including the ability to balance. That made for a problematic quick getaway, but the girl helped her stay upright as much as possible.

Finally they stopped in what seemed to be a storage room of some kind. Lining one wall were enormous glass tanks of yellow-green liquid, with slow, lazy spirals of bubbles working their way to the surface.

"Okay," the girl said, letting Jean lean against the wall while she went back to manipulating her handheld. "We can wait here for a minute, but we've gotta keep moving. Can you – can you walk, do you think?"

"I… don't know." It was getting worse; stringing the words together required Olympian effort. Jean felt along the curved metal band pinching her skull. "I have to get this off."

The girl looked appalled. "Don't touch it! I can't disarm it – I don't have the codes. Only _he_ does."

_Disarm_ it? Jean dropped her hand as if it had been burned – or detonated. "Who is he?"

The girl shook her head, panic vibrating from her every cell. "You don't want to know. You really really don't. You just want to get your friends and get out of here."

Jean accepted that as the truth. "So who are _you_?"

The girl was small and fine-boned, with dusky brown skin and masses of curly black hair. She was wearing a green-and-orange outfit that reminded Jean of surgical scrubs for some reason, although scrubs were never cut _that_ tight.

The girl pushed her hair back. Little stubs of silver metal framed her face. "Threnody. I – work here."

Jean tried to put that together, and gave up. "Like a lab assistant?"

"I guess." Threnody checked the handheld. "Okay, we have to do this fast. Your friend, the one you came with, is up in the house. But Scott is in the lower lab, and I don't know how we're gonna get through the security, but I promised him I'd try –"

Jean came off the wall with delight and relief – and then grabbed for the support again. "You've talked to him? He's okay?"

"Yeah. He's okay. Just a little, um, worse for wear." Threnody stuck the handheld in the waistband of her green pants. "Are you okay to run?"

"Not really," Jean said. She took a deep breath and tried an experimental psychic push against the headband. Predictably, pain stabbed at the space behind her eyes, leaving the world hot and askew. She leaned over and braced her hands on her knees, trying to keep her breathing level.

_You will not pass out_, she told herself fiercely. _You will save Scott. You will find Rogue. You will go home and have a good Christmas_.

"We have to run," Threnody said, fretting again. "When he finds out you're gone – We have to run."

Jean forced herself upright, blinking hard. "Then we'll run."

Threnody nodded, although she looked far from convinced. For that matter, Jean wasn't so sure, either, and the first few steps nearly convinced her that it was impossible.

Threnody carefully checked the corridor before easing out. Jean echoed her.

"Here we go," the other girl whispered. Fear and excitement danced in her voice, and she got a firm grip on Jean's forearm. "Follow me!"

And she took off at a run.

Jean didn't have a choice; it was run or be dragged. So she ran. She stayed on her feet for all of three yards and then lost her balance, spilling across the floor and nearly taking Threnody with her.

"Sorry," she said as Threnody hauled her up again, feeling embarrassed. As if any of it was her fault.

"Come on," was the only thing Threnody said.

As they continued through the maze of corridors, Jean did her best not to humiliate herself any further. It was more difficult than might be expected, given that her brain was being constantly microwaved. She staggered, she stumbled, she put out her hands to regain her balance more than once – but she didn't fall any more, and in her current condition, that was, she thought grimly, an accomplishment.

Finally, they came to an elevator that looked much too big for a lab with only one scientist and one assistant. It looked like a heavy freight elevator, in fact. Something used to haul literal tons of equipment.

The elevator door slid open as soon as they approached. Jean leaned against one metal wall inside, breathing hard enough to steam the panels. Threnody plugged her handheld into a terminal and touched the screen. The doors closed, and then the elevator lurched and began to descend with a protesting grind.

"This'll take us right to the lower lab," Threnody said. "I _might_ be able to hack the lab door controls, but like I said, security is super tight. _He's_ real serious about keeping you guys here."

"Why are you doing this?" Jean asked, too exhausted to be more polite. "Helping us?"

The girl fidgeted with a curling strand of hair, pulling it forward to obscure her face, and stared hard at her feet. "I… I asked to come here. _Begged_ him to take me. It doesn't matter why," she added in a rush. "But you didn't, and he can't –"

The elevator stopped with a jolt and a thud, but the doors didn't open; instead a little glyph lit up on the handheld's screen. It blinked patiently.

Threnody swiped at her eyes before looking up at Jean again. With tears still glinting, she said fiercely, "It's not right, what he wants to do with you guys! It's not _fair!_ And I – I couldn't live with myself, if… if…"

Jean put a hand on the girl's shoulder, trying to be comforting, and nearly fell over instead. "It's okay, Threnody. Thank you."

Threnody gave her a crooked, half-hearted smile. Pressed the blinking door glyph on the handheld.

The elevator door hummed open –

- and everything erupted into chaos.

The sterile, impersonal lighting suddenly turned cherry red. At the same moment an alarm began blaring, loudly enough to make Jean put her hands over her ears. She had to let go almost immediately in order to keep her balance.

"What happened?" she yelled at Threnody.

"I don't know!" Threnody was frantically tapping and clicking on the handheld. "Security's been tripped – but it wasn't _us!_ – I'm gonna pull up a video feed –"

Jean looked over Threnody's shoulder at the camera footage displayed on the tiny screen. Three – no, four - human figures were rampaging down the metal corridors. It was a testament to her mental blurriness that she didn't immediately recognize the ragged trenchcoat, claws, and long yellow hair.

Even when she did, the scene playing out made no sense. Was the neural scrambler making her hallucinate now, too? She squinted. "Are they… are they all Sabretooth?"

Threnody gasped and dropped the handheld as if it had bitten her. It hit the floor on one of its corners and shattered into a sparking mass of circuits and broken metal. Threnody gasped again, went down on her knees, and tried to pick it all up. "No, no _no no_! Oh, he's gonna _kill_ me – oh this is _bad_ –"

The noise and red lights were making it even harder for Jean to function. She wobbled and put one hand on the wall, squinting at the massive lab door and its impressive array of locks and scanners. Scott was behind that. Her heart leapt into her throat at the thought that she might never get any closer. "What's going on?"

"I was only supposed to activate _one!_" Threnody wailed, standing, clutching the handheld's pieces to her chest. She had gone pale in genuine fear. "To catch you guys – I don't know how _four_ got out!"

"It was five," a familiar voice growled in a very unfamiliar way. "And they're still after me, so can we get a move on?"

"Rogue!" Jean turned to see her teammate – too quickly; the corridor spun and she lost her already-precarious balance. Rogue caught her one-handed and easily set her upright again. Belatedly, Jean understood what Rogue's hairy appearance meant. "Oh no – don't tell me –"

Rogue raised her lip in a silent snarl, but it relaxed into a more rueful grimace. "Desperate times and all." She gave Threnody a suspicious once-over. "Who're you?"

"Threnody," Jean said. "She, um, works here. She's helping us escape."

Rogue's eyes narrowed to feline slits, and a low growl set up. "I don't like it."

"I – I really am," Threnody said, swallowing, nervous. She was inching away from Rogue. "Helping. I really am."

Jean put a hand on Rogue's arm and said, "She is."

Rogue sniffed, then shook all over, rather like a dog flinging off water. "Okay, okay. We ain't got time to argue about it." She looked at the lab door. "Scott's in there, right?"

Threnody nodded jerkily, dripping fragments of electronics. "But I can't – well, I never could get it open, but I definitely can't now."

Rogue flexed her clawed fingers. " 'Sokay - I brought some keys. Hey, what's wrong with you, Jean?"

"Neural scrambler," Threnody said while Jean was still processing the question. "It's blocking her powers."

"I can try to get it off first," Rogue said, sounding worried.

Jean shook her head – and regretted it, but not enough to weaken her resolve. "We came here for Scott, and we're going to get him. Right now."

"You bet we are." Rogue turned and stalked to the door. She sniffed around the scanners for a moment, then dug her claws into one and ripped it out of the wall, tossing it heedlessly behind her. It joined the bits of handheld already on the floor. A bit more slashing and tearing, and the door made a defeated clunking sound. "I think I got it!"

"The automatic locks are disabled. Now you just have to get it open!" Threnody scrambled to her feet, shedding the last fragments of her ruined handheld, and helped Jean get closer to the door. Rogue put one shoulder against the edge of the door and strained to muscle it open.

She had it almost halfway – just wide enough for Jean to see into the secure lab and identify more of the enormous, bubble-laden glass tanks – when the Sabretooths arrived.

Rogue turned from the door, saying, "Aw, not again -!"

Clones. Clones of Sabretooth.

Jean finally put it together: the enormous tanks of fluid, Milbury's lecture on eugenics, the reason for Scott's abduction.

_There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female. _

_An eye like Mars, to threaten and command._

_You were next on the list._

_Charles Xavier is not the only one with a dream for the future._

Milbury was making clones. More than that – he was trying to build a master race of sorts, an improved strain of mutant. And he was going to use Scott as the starting point.

But she didn't have time to puzzle through all of the implications. The pack rapidly closed the distance, and the lead Sabretooth gave a nasty, triumphant roar and leapt for their throats, claws out.

Jean put a hand to her forehead – touched cold metal – remembered she couldn't use to TK to bat him out of the air -

A high-pitched, eerie sound suddenly cut through the blaring security alarm. It was accompanied by a crackling blast of white light that intercepted the Sabretooth in mid-leap and slammed him into the opposite wall.

He dropped to the floor and didn't move.

Jean looked around, astonished, at the small, high-strung girl who had appeared, until this moment, to be largely inept at almost everything.

Obviously that wasn't quite the truth.

_Threnody,_ her fuzzy brain finally remembered, meant _death song_.

"There's another elevator inside the lab," Threnody said. White light was shimmering around her hands, and her words had a peculiar echo to them that made Jean's skin crawl. The other Sabretooths hung back, suddenly leery of fighting. "It'll take you up to the cellar. I'll hold them off. Run, and don't look back!"

Jean ducked through the door, followed by Rogue. They saw Scott immediately: he was inside one of the tanks, a breathing filter over his face and IV lines running from his arms. His eyes were covered by the mask. His sunglasses were lying on a computer console nearby.

And he was alive.

Rogue dragged the door into a more closed position, although she couldn't get it all the way. Jean picked up the ruby quartz glasses.

"How do we get him out?" Rogue asked, glancing uncertainly at the sleek, futuristic equipment and then at Jean.

Jean looked back at Rogue. She didn't need telepathy for this one.

"Right," the other girl said, grinning, and jump-kicked the curving glass wall of the tank. It cracked and then ruptured into a cascade of shards and yellow-green fluid. The decompression pulled Scott free, too, and he landed on the floor, coughing and sputtering and blind.

"What –" he said. The rest was lost in a choking hack.

In the corridor, a keening shriek rose to ear-splitting levels, and a burst of white light flashed so bright that it momentarily left the lab stamped in negative on Jean's eyes.

"Scott," Jean said. She knelt beside him (almost falling over in the process) and slid the glasses onto his face. His skin was cold, and the yellow-green fluid had left some kind of viscous, oily residue behind. "It's okay, we're here, you're safe, but we've got to leave right now. Okay?"

He nodded, said, "Yeah, good plan," and got to his feet, and the three of them made agonizingly slow progress towards the lab's elevator. Scott was just as unsteady as Jean, and soaking wet besides; his feet kept slipping on the metal floor.

"Both of y'all need to – _ungh!_ – lose some weight," Rogue grumbled, manhandling Jean and Scott into the small elevator. There weren't any buttons here, either; as soon as they were inside, the doors began to close automatically.

Just before they clicked and sealed shut, Jean heard a howl of triumph from one of the Sabretooth clones – followed by a scream of pain from Threnody.

"Threnody!" Jean called, belatedly putting out a hand. She met with nothing but the cold, curving metal surface of the door. There was no alarm blaring, no alerts flashing, only the faintest of hums as the elevator rose.

The silence was terrible and deafening.

"She'll be okay," Rogue said, but she sounded unsure, and when Jean turned to her, her face was bleak.

"Who?" Scott asked. "Who's Threnody?"

"No," Jean said. Her voice sounded shrill and unreasonable to her own ears, but she didn't stop: "We have to go back! We have to help her!"

"Jean, we can't!" Rogue said. "We have to get out of here, and you _know_ that!"

"She was only trying to help," Jean said. "She saved me! She saved _us_! We _owe_ her!"

"Calm down, Jean," Scott said, putting a hand on her arm. "You're right. We can –"

The elevator shuddered to an abrupt and unexpected stop. Everyone was thrown off-balance, including Rogue. Scott caught himself on the wall, and then caught Jean, who had hardly needed any help in being wobbly in the first place.

The elevator door slid open, revealing a large, rectangular room. It was well-lit, spotlessly clean, and composed of the same polished metal as the rest of the complex, although there was a large archway at the opposite end that looked decidedly rough and low-tech compared to the rest. The cellar steps were just beyond the archway; the cellar doors were still thrown open, and Jean could see snow falling in the night.

The room was empty except for the figure of a man standing a few yards away. He was wearing a dark gray suit with a blood-red tie. Even here, under good light, his eyes were no more than a suggestion – diamonds glinting among shadows.

He was smiling, and he was applauding, slow and measured.


	10. On Fire

_"And to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war  
All hot and bleeding will we offer them_  
…_. I am on fire…"_

_Henry IV _Act IV Scene I

* * *

"That's Lapouge, isn't it?" Rogue asked Jean in an aside. She didn't look at either Jean or Scott, because she didn't want to take her attention off of the man blocking their path to safety.

She remembered this room from her entry; she could easily smell her own scent still lingering in the air, along with those of the fake Sabretooths. Stepping through that archway had transformed it from ordinary cellar to secret lair, so it stood to reason that the reverse would bring them closer to home.

Right now she was perfectly content to define "victory" as "getting out of here alive".

"Milbury," Jean whispered back. She must've caught Rogue's _huh?_ frown, because she added, "He said his name was Milbury."

"It's him," Scott put in, scowling fiercely behind his sunglasses. "It's Milbury. He used to run the Boys' Home when I lived here. I remember _that_ much."

Lapouge, or Milbury, or whoever he was, stopped clapping and folded his hands behind his back.

"And so the mice have run the maze," he said, tone dry, words crisp.

Rogue stiffened; it was the man who'd spoken to her in the attic, right before he'd sicced that pack of Sabretooths on her. She snarled – it was somewhat involuntary – and said, "Yeah, and now you're standin' between us and the cheese."

He ignored her with consummate grace. "The sun and the moon, orbiting Mars once again," he said, spreading his hands in a gesture aimed at Jean and Rogue. "Do you feel better, young ladies, to have your center of gravity restored?"

"We only want to go home," Jean said in a conciliatory tone, at the same time Rogue barked, "Quit talking and fight already!"

Milbury smiled. It was a patronizing expression, and it was probably not the best one to use on somebody currently hosting a healthy dose of Sabretooth's personality.

Rogue saw red. She roared and charged him.

Milbury made a move as if to sidestep, but not fast enough; she raked her claws across his abdomen in a move designed to eviscerate him, her blood singing in fierce, predatory triumph.

"Rogue, no!" Scott yelled – too late.

The dark gray suit shredded. Black gashes appeared beneath the torn cloth – and Milbury put out a hand, lightning fast, and caught Rogue by her forearm.

"Well done," he said to her, sounding pleasantly surprised. A doctor heartened by his patient's unlikely recovery; a father proud of a reformed ne'er-do-well child. "Well done indeed. I was wrong: you _do_ merit further scrutiny."

Rogue struggled against his grasp, but even with Sabretooth's strength, Milbury wasn't giving her a millimeter. And as she watched, her triumph turning to wild frustration, the gashes that should have been a fatal wound closed over with barely a ripple, cloth and all.

"What _are_ you?" Rogue asked, recoiling as far as he would let her. "A shapeshifter?"

Milbury precisely and effortlessly twisted her arm in his grip until she cried out and went down on her knees. "I," he said, "am a man with a vision. An engineer. An architect of tomorrow."

"No," Scott said, anger crackling. "You're _done!_"

He pulled off his ruby quartz glasses and opened his eyes. The blast turned the room red, as if there were alarms going off here, too. As always, his aim was perfect; the blast hit Milbury squarely in the chest.

Scott's optic blasts were force beams. There was no heat behind them, despite their color. He could theoretically punch through a mountain, but he couldn't start a fire. Rogue had watched him hit dozens and dozens of enemies, real and simulated, with blasts of the exact same intensity as the one he was using now. She knew what was supposed to happen: Milbury would be knocked backwards, away from her, possibly into the wall. Then the three X-Men would regroup and either continue the attack or leave.

Instead, Milbury let out an agonized, uncontrolled scream and staggered back. His chest, where Scott's blast had struck, was reduced to a bubbling, frothy black goo.

It smelled terrible – like meat and rubber and chemicals all lit on fire at once, then doused with more of the same. Rogue hauled violently on her arm and at last succeeded in breaking free.

"What –" Milbury gasped in a voice gone suddenly raspy and metallic. He put one hand to the mess that used to be his upper abdomen, but didn't quite dare to touch it. "No - what – what have you – ahh -"

"Oh man," Rogue said, trying to hold her breath. This was _not_ the time to have an enhanced sense of smell.

Jean was on her knees, hand clamped over her mouth and eyes squeezed tightly shut.

Scott looked horrified. Then his mouth compressed into a determined line. He stepped forward and, deliberately, lifted his glasses again.

This blast impacted Milbury in the shoulder. The man – if that's what he was; there was enough mad science and weirdness here to comprise an entire archipelago of Dr. Moreau islands – made a sound that Rogue never wanted to hear any living thing make ever again. His shoulder disappeared into a seething, boiling mass, and he fell.

Milbury was a terrible person. He had kidnapped Scott, strapped that neural scrambler to Jean's head, used Rogue herself as Sabretooth bait, and saw all of them as specimens in some perverted sort of lab experiment.

But in that moment, watching him writhe in agony, Rogue felt sorry for him.

Just a little.

And only for a moment.

Scott stood over Milbury, one hand on his sunglasses. As tempting as it was to let Scott put a few more perforations in the bad guy, Rogue realized this was probably their last best chance to escape.

Jean was still on her knees. She had been white as a ghost ever since Rogue had caught up with her, and her looks were not improving with time. Now she was white as a ghost _and_ sweating bullets, and her eyes were taking on a glassy sheen that did not bode well at all.

Rogue scooped up Jean into something like a fireman's carry and grabbed Scott's collar with her free hand, dragging him with her. "Come on!"

"But –"

Another involuntary snarl. "Just move it!"

Behind them, Milbury gasped and guttered; then there was a brief flash of light. Rogue glanced over her shoulder, tensing for an attack, and was shocked to see…

Nothing.

Milbury was gone.

"Wait, where'd he go?" she demanded, putting on the brakes. She set Jean down, just in case, and made sure the other girl was steady before she let go. "What was that light?"

Scott looked back, too, one hand on his glasses. "He can't – teleport, can he?"

"He's a geneticist," Jean said. She leaned on Scott. "If he can clone Sabretooth -"

"Point taken," Rogue said.

"Let's get out of here before we run into any more surprises," Scott said.

They were at the archway. A step beyond it, the cellar stairs rose up, promising freedom – if they could survive it. Freezing wind howled down through the open doors, carrying snow that somehow never made it past the archway. It was pitch-black night outside, and obviously miserable; it would be doubly so for Scott, who was still head-to-toe wet.

The snow on the ground was even thicker now than it had been when she and Jean arrived. Rogue looked at her teammates and came to a sinking realization: Scott and Jean couldn't make it on their own two feet, and – "I can't carry both of you."

"Leave me here," Scott said immediately. "Take Jean first."

"No!" Jean exclaimed. "Scott, you have to get out of here!"

"We _all_ have to get out of here," he pointed out, level-headed and sensible. "But I can, um, hurt Milbury. It makes more sense for me to stay behind."

Rogue looked at Jean, who nodded grimly. Something else they agreed on.

Rogue grabbed Scott and threw him over her shoulder, then leaped up the stairs and into the snowstorm before he had a chance to do more than exclaim, "Hey!"

"Sorry," she said, a little breathless; bounding through the snow with a body on her back was _hard_.

"Go back!" he ordered.

"Not on your life." She reached the Blackbird and set him down, then had to haul him up into the cabin. "Stay here, start the engines, and I'll go get Jean."

For a moment, she stepped outside of herself and marveled at what was going on: barking orders at Cyclops, expecting him to obey – this had to be some sort of alternate reality.

But there was Scott, his clothes and hair with a sheen of fast-melting ice and snow, taking a seat in the pilot's chair and going through the startup.

Then his entire body stiffened, and he was out of the chair and trying to get past Rogue to the cabin door. "Whoa! Wait!" she said, blocking him.

"Something's wrong," Scott said, fear and worry playing across his face and coloring his voice. "Something's happening to Jean."

Rogue squinted out at the house. There was a light flickering by the side of the building, near the cellar doors. It was white, and it seemed to be getting both brighter and more erratic as she watched. "Don't worry, I'm going back right–"

The Milbury Boys' Home exploded.

It was there one moment – almost invisible in the dark and the swirling snow, but there – and then it erupted into a towering fireball.

Rogue put her arms up to shield her face and turned away slightly as the hot, dry blast wave reached her. An instant later, debris peppered the Blackbird, some pieces on fire, some large enough to leave dents. None of it hit her.

"Oh no," Rogue said, stunned, watching the building blaze.

Scott tried to push past her, more desperately this time. "Jean!"

She put one hand on his chest and shoved him back as hard as she could; with Sabretooth's strength, that meant he went flying across the cabin and slammed into the bulkhead on the other side. "Sorry," Rogue said, wincing. Then she told him, "Stay here!" and jumped out into the snow.

The house was still burning furiously. Hot cinders swirled and blew along with smoke, ash, and snowflakes. The snow would do nothing to dampen the fire; it was going to burn until there was nothing left but scorched earth.

Rogue couldn't bring herself to feel too bad about that.

Anxious, she retraced her path to the cellar doors and found Jean standing knee-deep in snow a safe distance away from the house. The older girl didn't seem to be burned, but there was blood trailing from her ears and nose. She was staring at the fire with blank-eyed terror, motionless while hot updrafts swirled her red hair around.

"Jean!" Rogue grabbed her arm and gave her a little shake. "Jean, what happened? You okay?"

Jean blinked and put a hand to her head. The neural scrambler was gone, Rogue suddenly noticed. "I… I'm okay."

"What happened? Did Lapouge – I mean Milbury – did he do this?"

Jean blinked some more. "I don't know," she said slowly, starting to sound more like herself. The glazed-over look left her face, and she focused properly on Rogue for the first time. "Milbury was here. He was talking to me… and then… I don't know where he went."

Rogue looked around, but her enhanced senses told her nothing. A cold shiver prickled along her back. "Come on, let's get out of here."

They ran through the snow to the jet, where Scott was waiting with the engines spun up.

Neither girl looked back.


	11. Safe

Note: Here we are, at the end! A big thank-you to everyone who reviewed - this fic was a long, strange trip for me (after all these years, I can't really believe I'm done with it, actually... what will I do now?), and I appreciate the many kind words thrown my way. :)

_"Safe may'st thou wander, safe return again!" _

_Cymbeline, _Act III, Scene V

* * *

When Jean woke up, it was Christmas morning.

And Scott was safe.

She rolled over onto her side, blinking in the muted light of the infirmary, taking stock. Scott was safe – he was right there, in fact, in the next bed over, still asleep. Rogue was safe; she was downstairs, also still asleep. And Professor Xavier was back, in his study, and he was safe, too.

_I'm okay_, she thought towards the professor, managing to keep her yawn restrained to the physical world.

_I know_, he answered. _We'll discuss your adventure later_.

She grimaced a little at the psychic question marks surrounding "your adventure." He would want to know everything, and she wasn't positive that she wanted to share. _Sure thing, Professor_, she told him, and sat up.

She was tired in body and mind, but it was the regular sort of tired that came from too much action and too little sleep - not the hollow, empty tired that she'd experienced the day after her power surge.

And it was not the painful fog of the night before. She breathed a sigh of relief, stretched, and looked at Scott again. He had a heavy bruise over his left temple that she hadn't noticed at the Boys' Home. But then, she'd been a little preoccupied.

_- fire __engulfs her, burning, destroying__ -_

She shuddered and instinctively flinched away from the memory, trying to pretend it didn't exist, that she didn't remember, that it was all "just a blur" and she was the same reliable, capable, _normal_ Jean that she always was.

Or mostly was.

- _the entire universe seems to tremble -  
_

No. She pressed her hands to her temples in concentration. She didn't want to think about last night. She wanted to forget all of it and just enjoy being home, safe, with Scott. It was Christmas; hadn't she earned her seasonal miracle?

_She sets an unsteady foot on the first step of the stairs. A shadow falls over her._

_"Proof," Milbury says, hissing it, "that intellectual ability does not guarantee common sense. Why are you trying to escape, my dear?"_

No.

She swung her legs around to the side of the bed and stood up, inordinately pleased at a lack of vertigo that until today she had taken for granted. Then she walked over to Scott's bed and paused there for a long moment, watching him with an unconscious little smile playing across her face.

To a telepath, love was the best of all emotions: true and strong and warm, full of life and promise. And she loved Scott. More than anything.

She perched on the edge of the bed and ran her fingers lightly over the bruise. The gesture wasn't intended to wake him, but it did; he stirred and after a heartbeat, his glasses turned towards her.

"Hey," he said.

She smiled and saw her reflection, in red, do the same. "Hi."

"Everything okay?" he asked, pushing himself up to a sitting position. He took her hand and held it loosely, carefully, softly.

_Jean somehow turns around and meets his cold, shadowed eyes. He's hunched over, one hand covering the horrible bubbling wound on his shoulder and chest, and yet he still manages to convey an aura of intimidation._

_"I'm not going to be your science project," she tells him hotly. "And neither are Scott and Rogue!"_

_Milbury hisses again, impatient, insulted. " 'Science project'! You have no idea, child. No idea at all. Enough. I'm not going to have my work undone by this __**foolishness**__."_

_"Rogue and Scott are gone," Jean says. She's sweating and can't catch her breath, and her body is now constantly trembling under the strain of fighting the neural scrambler. "So it's – it's only me being foolish."_

"I'm fine," she said brightly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She tried not to let any of the fear and panic of the memory flash play out on her face or in her voice. "Just a little tired."

He gave her a dubious look.

"Really," she insisted. She yawned and covered her mouth with her free hand. "I had a busy night."

_"Indeed," Milbury says drily. Somehow he straightens and slides a smile across his face even as black goo froths in his wounds. Somehow, his voice becomes friendly. "But this drama is unnecessary, Jean. Your potential is wasted at university, and at the Xavier Institute. Stay here, voluntarily. Not as an assistant. As… my protégé." _

_"Thanks," Jean says, struggling to get the syllables out, "but - not in a million years!"_

_The amused expression on Milbury's face doesn't change. And his voice is still warmly avuncular as he says, "Then I'm going to kill you, and your friends, and mine your bodies for DNA."_

Scott frowned. "Are you sure?"

She chuckled and leaned forward to kiss him, as gently and softly as he was holding her hand. "I'm very sure. You're home, we're all alive – I'm okay. I'm not going to have another meltdown, trust me."

_Jean instinctively puts out a hand to send him flying –_

_- and is driven to her knees by the most debilitating jolt yet. It feels as though her nervous system is ripping itself into a million pieces. But even as she screams (and she does scream), she makes up her mind._

_She is not going to back down. She is this close to freedom, to Scott and her __**life**__, and she is tired of being a rat in a maze, tired of fleeing from shadows, and this time she is __**not**__. Going. To. Stop._

"I trust you," he said, although he was still worrying. But she couldn't change that part of him – and she didn't want to; it was, after all, part of him. "So… do you still want to go to your parents' house?"

"I think I'd rather stay with the family I have here." She shifted position, moving closer to him. "Oh! Your present is there," she said, remembering.

He looked slightly sheepish. "Yeah… yours is in my luggage. Wherever _that_ ended up."

She had to laugh. "Maybe one year," she said, "we'll have a normal holiday."

_The pain collapses her altogether, until she's curled tightly into a fetal position on the floor, fingers trying to dig into the smooth metal but finding no purchase. It's like attempting to hold herself in place against a tornado, a hurricane. She feels herself being torn loose, tipping over an edge – the edge of her conscious, rational mind – tipping over it into the ocean of raw, wild chaos that is her powers._

_There's a rushing, roaring sound in her ears and the entire universe seems to tremble. Fire engulfs her, burning, destroying. And then –_

"Normal would be different," he agreed, smiling at her in a way that made her heart skip.

She smiled, too, suffused with the simple warmth of the moment. "Merry Christmas, Scott."

_She climbs unsteadily to her feet and stares around in shock. She is outside in the snow. The Boys' Home is burning furiously, the infrastructure showing through like the bones of a mortally wounded animal; it looks as though an atom bomb has gone off._

_Milbury is nowhere to be seen._

"Merry Christmas, Jean," he said. He touched her face, then kissed her, longer this time, and not as gently. Emotion vibrated across their psychic connection, pure and true.

Jean closed her eyes, held on to him, and tried to find the peace she was feigning so desperately.

_She stays where she is, staring, rooted to the spot by amazement and a sick fear._

_**What did I do?**__ she wonders. _

_Her hands are shaking, her body trembling, her mind reeling. _

_**What did I **__**do**__**? **_

.

.

.

Things could only improve from now on.

That was what Rogue thought, anyway, until she woke up on the Institute sofa to see Professor Xavier sitting next to her with a note in his hand.

No, not _a_ note: _the_ note. The one she'd taped to the front door a lifetime ago; she could clearly read the "missed his flight" part.

Oops.

"Rogue?" was the only thing he said.

She sat up and winced. Fake-Sabretooth's borrowed powers were gone, and she was feeling the last fourteen hours. For that matter, her uniform was definitely headed for the laundry room, ASAP. "Sorry. We didn't want to scare anyone," she mumbled.

"I see." He steepled his hands and said, "What happened?"

Rogue sighed and told him everything – well, not the parts where she and Jean had squabbled… which actually were few and far between, now that she thought about it. When push came to shove, they'd worked together with almost no animosity at all. Maybe there was something to be said for foxhole sisterhood.

"…and when we got back here, we were all pretty much exhausted, so we just crashed wherever," she concluded. "I couldn't face the stairs. I dunno where Jean or Scott ended up."

"The infirmary," the professor said. "A good choice - Jean has some sort of head injury."

The thought _Yeah, obviously_ flashed across Rogue's mind, but more out of habit than any actual ill-will. To her surprise she found she couldn't summon up any real envy or annoyance for the other girl.

Okay; she was definitely sleep-deprived or shell-shocked or _some_thing.

The professor gave her an understanding smile.

"Sorry," she said, dropping her gaze to the floor, face heating up.

He put a hand on her shoulder briefly, which made her feel less embarrassed. "I'm sorry I wasn't able to help. I should have been here, instead of chasing ghosts."

That reminded Rogue of the late-night conversation she'd only half-remembered in the first place. The night before last… Lord. It felt like two thousand years ago.

"Who's Ruth Bat-Seraph?" she asked him, because it still bugged her.

"An Israeli intelligence officer. She had information…" He sighed. "About my son."

That served her right for being nosy.

"Oh," she said lamely.

"But David – or Lucas, rather – had already left the Negev well before I arrived. It's all right, Rogue. I did not expect a happy ending." He folded his hands in his lap and frowned off into the middle distance, not seeing the Christmas decorations. "And right now, I'm more concerned about this 'Milbury'. What does he want? Where did he come from? What can we expect from him next?"

"Jean said he disappeared after she… did whatever it was she did." The spooky look on Jean's face still raised the hair on the back of Rogue's neck as she remembered it. Something truly bizarre had gone down; Rogue wasn't sure she wanted the details.

"Mm. I think we can safely assume he'll be back to cause more trouble," the professor said drily. "But now, at least, we can be on guard against him. Thank you, Rogue. You did an admirable job under very difficult circumstances."

Rogue felt herself blushing again; the professor didn't usually dispense praise so generously. "Thanks," she said, letting her hair slide forward to hide her face. "But, I mean, half of it was Jean."

"Yes," Professor Xavier said, smiling at her. "I know."

She returned the smile, feeling a small glow of pride, then flopped back on the couch as he left, presumably to check on Jean.

There was a sore spot on her arm, where Milbury had jabbed her with that needle. On the flight home, both Scott and Jean had related that he'd taken blood samples from them, so Rogue thought odds were good that he'd done the same in the attic. But what if he hadn't? She might never know… until it was too late.

Paranoia sucked.

So did cross-country expeditions into the Twilight Zone. From now on, she decided, no more adventures without the full team.

What a day.

She was holding one arm up, examining her ripped-up gloves and wondering if she should go swap them out for a new pair or grab some breakfast first, when a shadow fell over her.

Scott said, "Hey. Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas," she said, startled but pleased. She sat up again and scooted over to give him room, if he wanted to sit down.

"I just got off the phone with Alex," he said, sitting beside her. But not too close, and that stung a bit, despite all the good reasons for keeping his distance. Like her shredded uniform and fingerless gloves. "You know, maybe one year we'll get lucky and have a Christmas where nothing happens."

She looked at him sidelong. Aside from a large bruise on his face, he looked good – better than she did, probably. He had changed from the clothes he'd been wearing into a sweater and jeans. It was, she realized with a surge of warmth, the sweater she'd given him the Christmas they'd met Angel.

She snorted to hide her elation. "Yeah, sure. Is… is Jean okay?"

As soon as she asked, she felt like kicking herself. He was sitting right next to her, wearing her sweater, Jean was nowhere near, he wanted to talk, and she brought up his girlfriend. _Duh_.

But he seemed happy that she'd asked. "She's better. Professor Xavier is with her, and he said she'll be all right. That neural scrambler thing really messed with her head – in more ways than one. And there's something she's not telling me. It has to do with what happened after you and I left her." He frowned. "We shouldn't have done that."

"Scott," Rogue said, "if you think I flew three thousand miles, tracked you down, got chased through a haunted house, gave myself a werewolf makeover, and broke you out of a secret supervillain lab _just_ so we could all get caught again at the last second – maybe you deserve to get your butt thrown back in there."

He looked nonplussed, then cracked a grin. "Well, when you put it like that…"

"Besides, I was going back in, fire or not," she added. "X-Men don't leave each other behind."

"No, they don't."

She couldn't look at him any more; she'd either start blushing like a fool or grinning like one. Instead she fiddled with the ragged tips of her gloves.

"Here," he said after a moment, retrieving a little package wrapped in bright green-and-red paper from under the tree. He handed it to her, adding, "Sorry it's not anything better. I bought it before you, you know, tracked me down, broke me out of a secret lab, and saved my life."

_Half of it was Jean_, she'd just told the professor. And Alex had been a key part of it, too.

But she didn't say that to Scott. She wanted to hold his thanks to herself.

"It's perfect," she said, looking at the present in her hands.

His eyebrows went up behind his shades. "You haven't even opened it yet."

She looked up at him, then back at the gift. Ran her fingers over the paper and wished she could touch his skin. "Some things," she said, "you can just tell."

After a moment, Scott laid a hand on her shoulder, where her uniform was largely intact, and squeezed lightly. Gently. "Yeah," he said. "You can."

So Christmas turned out well after all.


	12. Mortality

_"__He was skilful enough to have lived still,  
if knowledge could be set up against mortality."_

_All's Well That Ends Well, _Scene I, Act I

* * *

Science, he reflected, rarely performed according to expectations.

That one might expect science to perform to any sort of standard at all was a peculiarly human conceit. Science was, at its core, the investigation of impenetrable mysteries, the ordering of the unorderable, the struggle to comprehend things beyond comprehension. What were hypotheses and experiments in the face of nature's vast, uncaring splendor?

So, no, science could not be expected to perform on command. Still, he would have appreciated less chaos in the unfolding of his latest endeavor.

"The activated units have been decommissioned and destroyed," Threnody said behind him. Her voice was meek – as well it should be. "There was, um, an error in the coding for the late-stage accelerated growth sequence, which explains why they, um, were so…"

"Unruly," he said.

Threnody gave a nervous, shaky half-giggle. "Yes sir. Unruly."

"Correct the coding in the next batch," he said.

"Yes sir." She took a breath. "Sir. It was my fault that they were all activated."

"I was already well aware of that," he said. "The list of suspects was fatally short. Still, I appreciate your honesty."

Another nervous giggle, this one dying out into a thin whimper. Very gratifying. "I, um, also verified that the, um, tesseract gate at the Boys' Home is destroyed… along with the house… so anyway, it doesn't matter if the X-Men come back. Did you get – It's not all ruined now, is it?" she asked, clumsy in her hopefulness. "Your experiment?"

"I'm surprised to hear that you care so much about my experiment," he said, deliberately using one of his more sinister tones. "I had supposed that your interests lay… elsewhere."

That shut her up, if only – inevitably – for a moment.

He waited, attention focused on the data scrolling down the screen before him, to see how his alleged assistant would respond.

"N-no sir," she said after a moment. "I mean, you've helped me so much… of course I want to help _you_ –"

"Excellent," he said. "You may begin by scrubbing out the incubation tanks. I will be needing them shortly."

"Yes sir."

She hesitated, but wisely chose to leave instead of talking further.

It was an unfortunate truth that he could not maintain full control over the many variables in this experiment. However (to paraphrase a trite piece of folk wisdom), one did not need to control _all_ of the variables _all_ of the time.

And – a fortunate truth – a little bit of deoxyribonucleic acid went a long way.

"'_Each generation has enormous power over the natural gifts of those that follow_,'" he said to the quiet, still air of his laboratory. "Well. Galton would be thrilled; I've proved him right at last."

There was no answer beyond the undercurrent hum and click of machinery. He had anticipated none. Talking to one's self was something of an eccentricity – but really, who else could he speak with? That short-sighted fool of a girl? Hardly.

The lack of intelligent company was something (perhaps the only thing) of the normal world that he truly missed. And would continue to miss, it seemed.

He spared a moment to press a hand to the healing wounds on his chest. Enormous power indeed; Summers and Grey had mutations far superior to his estimations. It would have pleased him more if they hadn't injured him almost beyond his ability to recover – but he was, if nothing else, a survivor.

"Now," he said, turning from the computer to the temperature-controlled racks beside it. "What can I do to ensure that our friend En Sabah Nur, '_whose influences are little suspected_,' and who is '_at this moment working towards the degradation of human nature_,' receives no more for his troubles than a black eye?"

He looked at the test tubes laid out in precise columns, each one cradling a microscopic embryo of tomorrow's more… _gifted_ world.

What indeed.

Nathaniel Essex smiled.

**--end--**


End file.
